John Locke in
JerusalemWritten on the 300th
Anniversary of the Death of John Locke

byMichael J. Thompson

T

he year
2004 passed without any mention of the 300th
anniversary of the death of John Locke. But thinking about
Locke and his contributions made me think almost at once of
the conflict in the Middle East; about ethnocentrism, the
role of religious identity and political identity; the ways
that secularism and liberalism are unique in their ability
to promote peace and social and political progress. Israel
is touted as the lone democracy in the Middle East. When it
is attacked, democracy too is being attacked. After 9/11
Israel has become a metaphor for what the United States has
seen as a changed world: The claim of Israeli democracy has
served ideologues of all kinds with different justifications
for a variety of different policies. But irrespective of
the rhetoric, the claim of Israel as being the lone
democracy in the Middle East requires significant
justification and it raises the question of exactly what
democracy means in a global context where different peoples
and ethnicities overlap and all too often degenerate into
violence.

One of the things that
political scientists examine is the phenomenon of political
culture. The basic question of this kind of research is:
How do political institutions operate in different cultural
environments where different ideas about the state, law,
rights and justice prevail? In the Middle East, individuals
and parties that align themselves with secular, universalist,
democratic traditions and political ideas have been slowly
but assuredly eclipsed by the politics of ethnic
particularism: a politics of group identity that trumps
universal rights and therefore the rights of minorities or
any other kind of “other.” There has been an erosion of the
ideas and values of political liberalism with its emphasis
on universal rights, a separation of religion and the
government and an ethic of religious and ethnic tolerance,
and a rise of the politics of ethnic particularism where the
decisive factor of politics becomes religious and ethnic
identity and the interests of the communities defined by
these bonds. It is this tendency within Israeli political
culture that is most distressing since it predates the
active rebellion of Palestinians—something that began
actually with the first intifada (uprising) in the
late 1980s, an event that marked the first stirring by
Palestinians in 30 years.

This does not mean to take away
from the progressive elements of Israeli society which have
advocated human rights, secularism and which have railed
against a culture and politics of Jewish statehood and
ethnicity. What does need to be pointed out is that the
very idea of a state defined by religious and ethic identity
becomes anti-liberal and therefore anti-democratic since it privileges a conception of politics which survives on the
basis of exclusion. The erosion of liberal political
culture in Israel has led, and continues to lead, to such a
conclusion. And there should be no mistake about what is at
stake: political culture is an issue of considerable concern
because it is out of that mass of beliefs and values that
institutions are rationalized, legitimized and redefined. Israel may in fact still possess liberal institutions and a
fair amount of liberal notions within its political
culture. But there is little doubt that the escalating
conflict with the Palestinians as well as the internal
conflict between secular and religious Israelis is pointing
toward a new reality on the horizon: the demise of
liberalism as a paradigm for Israeli politics, culture and
society. The claim of Israeli “democracy” therefore needs
to be subjected to more scrutinizing analysis.

Liberalism’s Enduring Contribution

The problems of cultural
membership, and the particular form of solidarity that it
entails, have always been seen to be at odds with ideas of
liberalism—and there is good reason to see why this is the
case. And it is important to point out that supposedly
“liberal” ideas can be co-opted and, in effect, distorted by
the politics of identity. In her book Liberal
Nationalism, Yael Tamir argues that liberalism’s ideals
of autonomy, free choice, and individual rights is in fact
not irreconcilable with nationalism and the sense of
belonging and loyalty to group identity that it entails. She sees the importance of liberal nationalism in its
ability to reconcile the needs of cultural membership that
individuals possess as well as the need for individual
autonomy that liberalism puts forth. But what is becoming
painfully obvious in the Middle East is that the emphasis on
cultural membership and its various “obligations,”
especially those of a nationalism grounded in ethnic
identity, have become not only a barricade to the
possibility of peace in the region, but also a cancer on the
prospects of liberal democracy inside Israel itself. Once
group identity is privileged, the suppression of the “other”
becomes ever more possible and, to be sure, more probable. What thinkers such as Tamir have overlooked are the ways
that ethnocentrism factors into national identity; the way
that nationalism itself can find coherence and strength
based on the denigration or devaluation of other nations;
and the ways that nationalism feeds the most irrationalist
and dangerous elements in politics and culture. What has become obvious
by the end of the twentieth-century is that any form of
politics which is grounded in ethnic identity and which
gives privilege to that ethnic identity over that of
universal citizenship and rights forfeits its ability to
govern impartially and with any sense of democratic justice,
especially in a time of national or regional crisis.

Liberalism is therefore not
something that can find a neat affinity with nationalism, as
thinkers like Tamir suggest. Quite to the contrary: what is radical and progressive about
liberalism—and here I am referring to the kind of liberalism
espoused by thinkers such as Locke and J. S. Mill, among
others—is the way that it removes ethnicity or religious
affiliation as a primary concern for political equality; the
way that it universalizes rights by abstracting the
individual from national, ethnic, racial and gendered
categories and therefore separates these categories from the
activity of the state and the content of its laws. Liberalism acts as a lever against pre-modern forms of
hierarchy, status and superiority. It rails against these
things because it promotes toleration, universalism and
equality. It prevents the denigration of the civil rights of
minorities by
ensuring that equality is attached the category of
personhood rather than on religious affiliation or
ethno-cultural membership. Locke’s notion of liberalism came not
only from the notion of a natural right to property, but—and
in many ways even more importantly for present
circumstances—the elimination of the ascripitive attributes
of individuals from the application of political rights. Whatever criticisms may be launched against liberalism for
its defense of property and its economic doctrines does
nothing to diminish its purely political impulse and the
salience it still retains in the context of racial and
ethnic conflict.

What was universal in Locke’s
liberal political theory was the category of the person—not
male, Christian or of any particular social status. Locke’s
Deism was profoundly important for his conception of
liberalism and the notion of tolerance that it entailed:
since God did not intervene in the affairs of men and was
only a creator of first causes who had receded from the
universe and its unfolding—this was standard Enlightenment
Deism, invoking the notion of the deus abscondus that
the Protestant Reformation had inaugurated—there was no
reason to involve religion with the state or to allow
different religious views to lead to different or unequal
rights under the state. This became a standard argument
during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century—indeed,
Voltaire would make a very similar argument decades after
Locke. This also reinforced the secular character of the
state which leads, in more contemporary arguments, to
arguments for pluralism: ethnic and racial minorities ought
to be accorded equal rights because of their status as
persons, not because of any other characteristic they may
actually possess.

Whereas Locke’s doctrine would
become a radical cry against both the church’s influence in
government as well as feudal social arrangements and the
forms of hierarchy of pre-modern society, his continued
relevance can be seen in the way that his philosophy
structured the relationship between the individual, the
state and religious affiliation (which in modern terms can
be conflated with ethnicity or race). Locke’s immediate
concern was the various religious wars of his time—a similar
concern of Thomas Hobbes decades before—but his ideas are
not bound to their historical roots. Locke’s ideas about
toleration were in fact not theoretical insights, spun from
the abstraction of philosophy. The time he spent in the
Dutch Republic—which was founded as a secular state allowing
religious difference to flourish before the Calvinist church
took power there—was crucial in forming his ideas about
tolerance and the foundations of what we know now as the
liberal political ideal of political equality. The
conception of religious tolerance has broadened to become
one of racial and ethnic tolerance in modern liberal
democracies. But it is here that the roots of the cultural
and political crisis of the Middle East can be glimpsed: the
impossibility of true liberal democracy means not only the
reversion to crude forms of nationalism or ethnic particularism, it also means the continuation of what the
anti-liberal, Nazi political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt
theorized as the centerpiece of all politics: the division
between “us” and “them.” Coexistence becomes impossible and,
in time, dialogue does as well.

Israel and Anti-Liberalism

An anti-liberal politics has
gradually become the norm in Israel, and this translates
itself into a crisis that affects both Palestinians and
Israelis and their mutual interests in peace and
coexistence. In political struggles, we are more often than
not defined by what we oppose and this means that both sides
are sliding increasingly away from a politics which
encompasses the other to one which deliberately excludes the
other. We are supposed to believe that Israel, being the
only democracy in the Middle East, is under attack just as
the West is by Islamic terror. But the problem is that
Israel can only be classified as a Jewish democracy, not
much more and this leads to the perpetuation and, in many
ways, the intensification of the present conflict. In other
words, Israel is a democracy that grants a specific group,
Jews, legal and political priority over its Arab minority
within its legal borders and, of course, the Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories. Indeed, whatever the legalistic
gains made by petitioning the High Court of Justice and its
more recent, liberal leaning—especially the so-called “Barak
Court”—Israel’s treatment of its own Arab minority has been
less than democratic since the Court itself is weak with
respect to policy and has little enforcement mechanisms
available to it. Whether it is the seizure of Arab land in
East Jerusalem or the As Zionism turns from an ideology of
Jewish political autonomy from centuries of political,
social and cultural dependence on others to one of political
and ethnic tribalism, the chances for truly liberal—i.e.,
secular and without any form of ethnic orientation—political
institutions become increasingly bleak.

What is needed more than ever
is the resurgence of liberal institutions and ideas. The
Sharon government’s policy of “disengagement” ought to be
seen for what it actually is: the continued expansion of the
state of Israel to encompass what a highly mobilized
religious minority see as the “Land of Israel” (Eretz
Yisrael). It is a policy that serves the ends of both
extremist religious zealots as well as extremist secular
ends of territorial expansion and national separation from
Arab lands. The fuel for this broad policy has rested on
the notion that ethnicity is somehow tied to geography and
it is ethnicity—not land—that is primary in the Middle East
conflict and it is Israel Zangwill’s famous slogan that
Palestine was, for Jews, “a land without a people, for a
people without a land” which links the way that ethnicity,
land and politics are layered in the Middle East conflict.

There should be no mistake
about the roots of the perpetuation of the current conflict:
the secular Zionism of Sharon and many members of the
right-wing Likud party is premised on the very idea of
ethnic particularism and the identity of the state of
Israel with the people of Israel. The classic
distinction made by thinkers like Kant and Hegel between a
political community organized by emphasizing the irrational
bonds of blood, kinship, and common identity whether it be
racial, religious or otherwise (Volkstaat), was
contrasted with one organized by the universality of human
subjects and held together by rational laws (Rechtstaat). The Israeli Volkstaat has slowly emerged as the
prominent path for the future and this can only spell
disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike since it will
breed nothing but continued resentment and separation, both
distinct and long-term barriers to peace. The choice for
both sides is becoming more painfully clear as time goes by:
either to side with the liberal, universalist, secular
character of the state and its laws which emphasizes
rational discourse and deliberation or to choose to have
political power fused to ethnicity and identity.

Indeed, whereas many of the
founders of the state of Israel were of secular orientation
seeing the newly born Israeli state as a chance for
socialistic economic and political institutions, the present
state of Israel sees itself less and less in touch with the
western political ideas and traditions of many of its
founders. The liberal tendencies within Israel have been
weakening as the ideology of Jewish particularism has been
gathering strength, especially from Jewish groups abroad
(i.e., the United States). Only once the cultural
imperatives of both Israelis and Palestinians are reoriented
from particular interests to common interests can there be
genuine improvement on this front; and such a reorientation
rests on a transformation in political culture away from
ethnic particularism and toward political universalism. All
forms of political and cultural particularism lead to
similar forms of counter-politics that are equally as narrow
and eschew broader forms of solidarity and opportunities for
dialogue—Israel’s continued exclusion of Arabs and the need
to hold on to the anachronistic notion of a Jewish state has
created the dimensions of the present Middle East crisis and
its continuing pursuit of such policies will only deepen the
rift between the two sides even more, allowing irrational
and extremist voices to drown out those that are rational,
tolerant and progressive.

Only a political order that is
founded on justice and equality in universal and secular
(i.e., non-ethnic) terms can, over time, solve the problems
faced by both Israelis and Palestinians alike. The move
away from political institutions grounded in such ethical
imperatives can mean nothing more than perpetual violence
and the erosion of any meaningful political life outside of
mere survival. If Locke’s message was valuable over three
hundred years ago, it is certainly more so today. Faced
with the currents of globalization and stubborn ethnic particularism, Locke’s insights about equality and the
political nature of the individual achieves an even greater
relevance. Using the conflict in Israel-Palestine as an
example of the relevance of the liberal ideas that Locke
helped put in motion does not mean that they are limited to
that context. From Iraq with its explosive, imbalanced mix
of religious and ethnic identities to the Balkans and
Indonesia, liberal political institutions and, perhaps more
importantly, a liberal political culture will be the only
way for the massive abuses and conflicts that have marked
these places be overcome.

In Israel—a thoroughly modern
nation in almost every other way—the stubbornness of its
ethno-religious identity will continue to serve as an
insurmountable obstacle to an enduring peace in the region. By turning away from the ideas of liberal democracy and the
universal character of equality, individualism and rights
that it embodies, Israel forfeits its ability to act as a
progressive force within its own conflicted relationship
with its Arab inhabitants who have legitimate rights in
their own land. And whatever Zionism’s intentions twenty,
thirty or even sixty years ago may have been, they are
certainly not what they were when Martin Buber could write
with genuine sincerity—if not naïveté as well—about the
intentions of the Jewish migration to Palestine: “The more
fertile the soil becomes, the more space there will be for
us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them: we
want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them, we
want to serve with them.”

Michael J. Thompson is the founder and
editor of Logos and teaches Political Science at
William Paterson University.